Best paragraph: "And even if my whole reply to Jones’ critique is wrong, Hive Mind strongly implies that the U.S. should eagerly welcome any migrant with an IQ of 98 or higher, which is well over a billion people worldwide."
Let’s take “high skill immigrant culture” above. Vivek’s values sound awful to me. And they have had a terrible effect on the countries that have adopted them (Asia has low productivity rates compared to ours, low innovation rates per capita, and apocalypse TFRs). The very last thing I want is for our elite norms to become more Vivek striver style.
This seems to get to the heart of the matter. I think all of us, including Jones, agree that there are hundreds of millions (or more) people who could come to Developed nations and add value to themselves and us.
The sticky point is that this is not what “open borders” is. OB implies that absolutely nothing prevents another billion plus people who want to come to California, set up a tent under an overpass and get a welfare check and free healthcare. Not only would 51% of Californians accept these people with compassion, they would call anyone questioning the situation a name that starts with an “R”. Heck, they would probably be willing to fund a non profit organization that assists these people getting here and setting up their tents.
I am extremely pro immigration. Open borders is an absolute non starter in Europe or any Blue state.
You are very altruistic. All of your claims say that the total net benefit to the world is large. But unless I'm reading things incorrectly, all of the benefits accrue to the immigrants. But how about the benefits to current citizens of the US? Are current citizens worse off, especially if politics and governance degrade?
And since as Garrett Jones points out, virtually all the scientific advances have come from a small set of countries, couldn't open borders in those countries be killing the goose that lays the golden egg? Shouldn't you be a bit more cautious in advocating for that?
I'm all for increasing immigration for high IQ individuals, especially from high trust cultures. But all the corruption I've seen from immigrants coming from low IQ/trust countries make me skeptical of your claims.
1) I would caution that even Garret Jones attempts to avoid charges of "racism" and it affects his work. For instance, ancestry is an attempt to not say IQ (and a less worthy metric) and his "cultural" examples are limited to things woke would accept (like that the confederate diaspora are bad).
2) The United States as a unicorn rate 30x per capita that of Japan. Even the EU has a unicorn rate 5-10x.
East Asia famously has an average IQ of 105, no underclass to speak of, and sound urban governance. It's poor compared to us, stagnant for decades now after the catch up growth is gone, woefully inefficient, and has apocalypse level TFRs. Obviously, there is more to elite human accomplishment than IQ.
I can think of no worse outcome than for the wests smart fraction to adopt the cultural habits of East Asian elites. Something that seems inevitable if Harvard is 80% Asian.
3) Current third world countries benefit massively from the runoff of first world countries. They have antibiotics, plumbing, cell phones, the internal combustion engine, etc. Despite the fact that they probably would not produce these things on their own! They mostly dig shit out of the ground and sell it to us in exchange for literally technological miracles.
What would happen if there was no place to sell their raw materials to? What if the west collapsed because it imported a bunch of third worlders and itself became a third world country?
4) I have a different vision for the world. Smart people in smart societies continually advancing human accomplishment and excellence. Any drudge work done by robots or other automated machines. These human gods free to govern themselves rather than being slaves to the unwashed masses.
Bryan's vision is world as a giant Favela at best.
I think this whole argument is bizarre. Try to apply this logic to something smaller, like a corporation, and the whole thing falls apart. If you took the all the workers from the poorest performing company in the US - let's say Spirit airlines - and moved them all to work for the best performing - let's say Open AI - there would not suddenly be a huge improvement in real performance at the combined organization. At best the Spirit airlines folks would now be earning more, but this would come at the cost of profitability and not thanks to improved performance of OpenAI. There's a limit to how many low skilled roles OpenAI needs and there's also a limit to how far training could take a low skilled employee from Spirit. Worse, high skilled Spirit employees (e.g. pilots) might have skills that are completely useless to OpenAI. The combined organization would then get stomped by Anthropic since they would not have the dead weight of Spirit airlines employees slowing them down and increasing their payroll with no benefit to output.
But worst of all, this would change the culture at OpenAI and likely make it less competitive in the future (see the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger for an example of what that might look like).
I think the parallels are obvious, and the rosy predictions seem predicated on the model of people as interchangeable human cogs. IQ is great and all, but skills learned in one cultural/educational context don't always transfer to another and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks (even a high IQ dog). Assuming that a 105 IQ immigrant will be up and running with the same productivity as his 105 IQ native counterpart in his/her lifetime is wishful thinking.
If all the existing Americans are exterminated and replaced with twice as many new Americans who are twice as rich that is a utility gain. But for whom?
"Almost everyone is vastly more productive in the First World than in the Third World"
Yet I've never observed any difference in the actual work performed by the forementioned maid, gardener or janitor. Perhaps the problem is how you define productivity as dollars earned. Somehow making an American bed is considered more productive then a Hatian one, but is it?
Yes. It has to do with value added. Making the Haitian bed adds much less value, where value is measured as we economists always measure it: in the eyes of the valuer, ie., the consumer.
People think it’s cheap because the Haitian maid gets heavily subsidized by the state. Their kids are getting fed k-12. They are on Medicaid. They retire one day. Etc.
But all that cost just shows up in their tax bill (and gov debt). They don’t actually have a clue what the real cost of that maid is, they can only see the direct wage rate.
This of course doesn’t count any other impacts the maid will have. Imagine for instance what our politics would be like if nobody who immigrated (or was borne to an immigrant) voted? That would have a gigantic impact on our society. I like school choice for instance, I had to move to the Sunbelt to get it. It will never happen where I grew up because immigrants vote for democrats In exchange for welfare.
"Somehow making an American bed is considered more productive then a Hatian one, but is it?"
In addition to DRH's spot-on point, consider that the American whose bed is made by the Haitian now has more time freed up to be productive doing even higher valued things.
The identical logic to why executives pay for assistants. because it frees up their time to do even higher value-added work.
My parents were public school teachers who had a maid. And they just added additional TV watching to the time they didn't have to spend cleaning the house. Most people would do the same.
My biggest problem with BC is that in his push for literally open borders - which despite his handwaving to the contrary, we have no evidence of successes for in modern democracies with welfare states - is that it makes it more difficult to get to the position that all reasonable Americans and pro-growth types should support:
- a whole lot more legal immigration and essentially unlimited high-skill immigration.
BC could be a force helping to make that happen.
Once we did that, it would make more plausible his goal of fully open borders, and provide evidence for his claims (not proof, but a lot more evidence).
Done properly, the welfare risks are negligible and the cultural risks are very small.
Instead, his arguments only encourage leftists to champion illegal immigration and thus make it impossible to reform - and massively expand - our legal immigration system.
With his actual chosen tactics, BC seems content to burn multiple $100B dollar bills in his quest for his claimed trillion dollar one.
Allowing his “best” to be the enemy of the very very very very good.
That's a good analogy. What indeed does happen to the socialized schools when the dumbest kids are the only ones left?
I think the answer there is the dumb kids are taken care of. No problem. But in the analogy dumb kids live among the smart kids whereas in a poor country where the dumb ones are in a single geographic place their leaders would recognize the problem and want to do something about "the brain drain." They will simply stop the exodus.
Well, if they are dictators who "build a wall", there might not be much we can do about it.
Unless they are dictators like that - and that costs them a fair amount of money - then perhaps they implement better policies to keep smart people there. Most people do not want to move away from their home country if they can reasonably avoid it.
Best paragraph: "And even if my whole reply to Jones’ critique is wrong, Hive Mind strongly implies that the U.S. should eagerly welcome any migrant with an IQ of 98 or higher, which is well over a billion people worldwide."
I don't want a billion more people in the US, doubly so because those people share none of my values and cultural practices.
None of them? Tell me in some detail what your values and practices are.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?lang=en
Let’s take “high skill immigrant culture” above. Vivek’s values sound awful to me. And they have had a terrible effect on the countries that have adopted them (Asia has low productivity rates compared to ours, low innovation rates per capita, and apocalypse TFRs). The very last thing I want is for our elite norms to become more Vivek striver style.
This seems to get to the heart of the matter. I think all of us, including Jones, agree that there are hundreds of millions (or more) people who could come to Developed nations and add value to themselves and us.
The sticky point is that this is not what “open borders” is. OB implies that absolutely nothing prevents another billion plus people who want to come to California, set up a tent under an overpass and get a welfare check and free healthcare. Not only would 51% of Californians accept these people with compassion, they would call anyone questioning the situation a name that starts with an “R”. Heck, they would probably be willing to fund a non profit organization that assists these people getting here and setting up their tents.
I am extremely pro immigration. Open borders is an absolute non starter in Europe or any Blue state.
Red state, too.
You are very altruistic. All of your claims say that the total net benefit to the world is large. But unless I'm reading things incorrectly, all of the benefits accrue to the immigrants. But how about the benefits to current citizens of the US? Are current citizens worse off, especially if politics and governance degrade?
And since as Garrett Jones points out, virtually all the scientific advances have come from a small set of countries, couldn't open borders in those countries be killing the goose that lays the golden egg? Shouldn't you be a bit more cautious in advocating for that?
I'm all for increasing immigration for high IQ individuals, especially from high trust cultures. But all the corruption I've seen from immigrants coming from low IQ/trust countries make me skeptical of your claims.
Thanks for posting! Will a recording of the debate be available online?
1) I would caution that even Garret Jones attempts to avoid charges of "racism" and it affects his work. For instance, ancestry is an attempt to not say IQ (and a less worthy metric) and his "cultural" examples are limited to things woke would accept (like that the confederate diaspora are bad).
2) The United States as a unicorn rate 30x per capita that of Japan. Even the EU has a unicorn rate 5-10x.
East Asia famously has an average IQ of 105, no underclass to speak of, and sound urban governance. It's poor compared to us, stagnant for decades now after the catch up growth is gone, woefully inefficient, and has apocalypse level TFRs. Obviously, there is more to elite human accomplishment than IQ.
I can think of no worse outcome than for the wests smart fraction to adopt the cultural habits of East Asian elites. Something that seems inevitable if Harvard is 80% Asian.
3) Current third world countries benefit massively from the runoff of first world countries. They have antibiotics, plumbing, cell phones, the internal combustion engine, etc. Despite the fact that they probably would not produce these things on their own! They mostly dig shit out of the ground and sell it to us in exchange for literally technological miracles.
What would happen if there was no place to sell their raw materials to? What if the west collapsed because it imported a bunch of third worlders and itself became a third world country?
4) I have a different vision for the world. Smart people in smart societies continually advancing human accomplishment and excellence. Any drudge work done by robots or other automated machines. These human gods free to govern themselves rather than being slaves to the unwashed masses.
Bryan's vision is world as a giant Favela at best.
I think this whole argument is bizarre. Try to apply this logic to something smaller, like a corporation, and the whole thing falls apart. If you took the all the workers from the poorest performing company in the US - let's say Spirit airlines - and moved them all to work for the best performing - let's say Open AI - there would not suddenly be a huge improvement in real performance at the combined organization. At best the Spirit airlines folks would now be earning more, but this would come at the cost of profitability and not thanks to improved performance of OpenAI. There's a limit to how many low skilled roles OpenAI needs and there's also a limit to how far training could take a low skilled employee from Spirit. Worse, high skilled Spirit employees (e.g. pilots) might have skills that are completely useless to OpenAI. The combined organization would then get stomped by Anthropic since they would not have the dead weight of Spirit airlines employees slowing them down and increasing their payroll with no benefit to output.
But worst of all, this would change the culture at OpenAI and likely make it less competitive in the future (see the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger for an example of what that might look like).
I think the parallels are obvious, and the rosy predictions seem predicated on the model of people as interchangeable human cogs. IQ is great and all, but skills learned in one cultural/educational context don't always transfer to another and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks (even a high IQ dog). Assuming that a 105 IQ immigrant will be up and running with the same productivity as his 105 IQ native counterpart in his/her lifetime is wishful thinking.
Canada has tried your experiment and is worse off. Per capita GDP is lower and the cost of living is higher.
If all the existing Americans are exterminated and replaced with twice as many new Americans who are twice as rich that is a utility gain. But for whom?
"Almost everyone is vastly more productive in the First World than in the Third World"
Yet I've never observed any difference in the actual work performed by the forementioned maid, gardener or janitor. Perhaps the problem is how you define productivity as dollars earned. Somehow making an American bed is considered more productive then a Hatian one, but is it?
Yes. It has to do with value added. Making the Haitian bed adds much less value, where value is measured as we economists always measure it: in the eyes of the valuer, ie., the consumer.
People think it’s cheap because the Haitian maid gets heavily subsidized by the state. Their kids are getting fed k-12. They are on Medicaid. They retire one day. Etc.
But all that cost just shows up in their tax bill (and gov debt). They don’t actually have a clue what the real cost of that maid is, they can only see the direct wage rate.
This of course doesn’t count any other impacts the maid will have. Imagine for instance what our politics would be like if nobody who immigrated (or was borne to an immigrant) voted? That would have a gigantic impact on our society. I like school choice for instance, I had to move to the Sunbelt to get it. It will never happen where I grew up because immigrants vote for democrats In exchange for welfare.
"Somehow making an American bed is considered more productive then a Hatian one, but is it?"
In addition to DRH's spot-on point, consider that the American whose bed is made by the Haitian now has more time freed up to be productive doing even higher valued things.
The identical logic to why executives pay for assistants. because it frees up their time to do even higher value-added work.
My parents were public school teachers who had a maid. And they just added additional TV watching to the time they didn't have to spend cleaning the house. Most people would do the same.
I love the "what if the entire world moved to US" hyperbole.
In that case, I'd claim the rest of the planet for myself!
My biggest problem with BC is that in his push for literally open borders - which despite his handwaving to the contrary, we have no evidence of successes for in modern democracies with welfare states - is that it makes it more difficult to get to the position that all reasonable Americans and pro-growth types should support:
- a whole lot more legal immigration and essentially unlimited high-skill immigration.
BC could be a force helping to make that happen.
Once we did that, it would make more plausible his goal of fully open borders, and provide evidence for his claims (not proof, but a lot more evidence).
Done properly, the welfare risks are negligible and the cultural risks are very small.
Instead, his arguments only encourage leftists to champion illegal immigration and thus make it impossible to reform - and massively expand - our legal immigration system.
With his actual chosen tactics, BC seems content to burn multiple $100B dollar bills in his quest for his claimed trillion dollar one.
Allowing his “best” to be the enemy of the very very very very good.
If all the most productive of the poorest people move away from the third world country what does that do to their economy?
I reject the implications of your question.
They are the same as the logic of the teachers union sympathizers who agitate against schools choice:
“But if the brightest students leave our worst public schools, what will happen to the students who remain?” It is a most grotesque logic.
[Separately, an answer to your question is remittances from people working abroad are a very lucrative win-win.]
That's a good analogy. What indeed does happen to the socialized schools when the dumbest kids are the only ones left?
I think the answer there is the dumb kids are taken care of. No problem. But in the analogy dumb kids live among the smart kids whereas in a poor country where the dumb ones are in a single geographic place their leaders would recognize the problem and want to do something about "the brain drain." They will simply stop the exodus.
"They will simply stop the exodus."
Well, if they are dictators who "build a wall", there might not be much we can do about it.
Unless they are dictators like that - and that costs them a fair amount of money - then perhaps they implement better policies to keep smart people there. Most people do not want to move away from their home country if they can reasonably avoid it.
Might create opportunities for the left-behind (to rise)?